A Who’s Who of American Military Leaders

What’s behind the shakeup in U.S. military command in Afghanistan and who’s calling the shots on military strategy in Washington? We’ll speak with Dr. Kalev Sepp, professor at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterrey, California. He was the Iraq Study Group’s military expert and until 2009 he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Capabilities.

Are Commuter Planes Safe?

Cockpit voice recordings reveal that 24 year-old first officer Rebecca Shaw had never experienced icy conditions in flight and seemed unaware that the plane she was co-piloting was facing those conditions. We take a look at three days of National Transportation Safety Board hearings into the February crash of Continental Connection flight 3407 near Buffalo. Former NTSB chairman Jim Hall tells us what he thinks needs to be done to ensure safer skies.

Pelosi Says She was Mislead on Waterboarding

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke with reporters today, and hit back hard against allegations by Republicans that she was trying to cover up what she knew about the waterboarding of terror suspects. We speak with ABC senior political reporter, Rick Klein.

India’s Election

Kashmiri Muslim women laugh as they push each other playfully outside a polling station in Wattergam, some 75 Kilometers (47 miles) from Srinagar, India, Wednesday, May 13, 2009. Millions of Indian voters headed to the polls Wednesday to pick a new parliament in the final phase of the country's month long national election. Security was tight across north India, where more than 68,000 paramilitary soldiers were deployed, and Kashmir, where separatists have called for a boycott of the polls. (AP)

Kashmiri Muslim women outside a polling station in Wattergam, some 47 miles from Srinagar, India, Wednesday, May 13, 2009. (AP)

India’s marathon election cycle is over but the results won’t be announced until Saturday. We speak to the BBC’s George Arney in New Delhi, who just completed a 5-thousand mile train trip around the country during the month-long voting period.

The Inventor of the Klingon Language

The newest Star Trek movie is a box office hit despite one notable absence: the Klingons. The long time villains of the Star Trek series speak their own language created by Berkeley educated linguist Marc Okrand. We speak with Marc about the process of inventing an alien language for Hollywood.

Music from the show

Peter Dixon, “Nagog Woods”
Ahmad Jamal, “Patterns”
Nathan Milstein, “Bach: Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin”
Radiohead, “There, There”
Freddie Hubbard, “Little Sunflower”
Paul Simon, “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”

Rodney Lister

It drives me crazy that your coverage of Nancy Pelosi, which I just heard, didn’t mention, let alone emphasize, the fact that the same people who contend that torture is fine–justified by it’s results (it worked for the Nazis after all) (and, presumably, think this is a case where moral relativism is also just fine)—are the same people who are complaining that Nancy Pelosi didn’t do anything to try to stop it. How does that make any sense, and how does your coverage not mentioning that little contradiction do anything other than buy into their claims?